I admit that it has been going on for a while and has been fueled by reading too many Isaac Asimov stories about futuristic bots (written in the '50s but with an uncanny prediction of the future, check them out).

Yesterday I took this obsession to new heights and decided to makeJohn Brown into a Slack-based chatbot...Brownbot was born in fewer than 20 minutes. The real and virtual Browns are almost identical in every way. Same jokes, same tendency for swear-ridden hyperbole and same constant need to be in the middle of things.

But fewer than 24 hours after Brownbot was created (and most unlike its namesake), it is already running out of ideas. The jokes are old, the GIFs are tired and the swearing just seems crass. While this saddens me deeply as a human-being, it delights me as a comms professional and here's why: all the 24/7 always-on bots in the world still need cutting-edge creative, inspirational content and depth of context to engage audiences. And this is where we excel. This is what we live for.

So how long before all we're doing is generating creative for the Bot overlords in some weird Matrix style, content factory fueled only by cold-press coffee? Asimov suggests the year 2058....I'd give it about four months.

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“I kinda thought Suzannebot would have some new jokes today,” quipped a colleague one morning, calling attention to an important point: If Suzannebot was going to stick around, she had to learn to do more. As another colleague reminded me with a jab, Suzannebot was “only as smart as who built it.”